all the information, none of the junk | biotech • healthcare • life sciences

As the child of a military physicist, Richard Lifton was forced to move around a lot, from Washington, DC, to Albuquerque, New Mexico, to Ankara, Turkey. As an adult he settled in Connecticut, where he became a renowned geneticist at Yale University.

“It’s just an incredible opportunity in the most vibrant city in the world,” Lifton says. “There’s a tremendous life sciences community in New York and I think there’s an awful lot that can be done here.”

“It’s wildly underdeveloped,” Lifton says of New York’s life sciences scene. “It’s not impossible [to build the city’s biotech ecosystem], it’s doable, but there are certainly are challenges to making it happen.”

One challenge is that over the past year a number of the city’s key life sciences leaders have gone elsewhere, or announced plans to leave. Tessier-Lavigne became Stanford’s president on Sept. 1. Weill Cornell Medical College dean Laurie Glimcher will begin running the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston at the end of the year. Gillian Small, the vice chancellor for research at the City University of New York, just left for Farleigh Dickinson in New Jersey in August after a roughly 15 year stint. And Lenzie Harcum, who had been overseeing the New York City Economic Development Corp.’s life sciences work, left the agency last month for the New Jersey Economic Development Authority.

These changes have left a leadership void in New York, all during what Tessier-Lavigne had called a “fragile time in the [city’s] growth” at the annual meeting of the trade organization NewYorkBio in May. “It can’t be too difficult to overcome [the real estate] hurdle,” he said at the time. “If it is, we’ll find that the people who’ve been drawn here to start things will pack up their bags and go back to places where it’s easier to do it.”

That’s the situation Lifton is stepping into as he takes over Rockefeller. Onlookers are waiting to see … Next Page »